Tag: media

The fringes of the SJW media would like nothing better than to generate another Ruby Ridge out of Owen Benjamin’s Beartaria:

A group of nine of Benjamin’s neighbors have grown concerned about the prospect of Benjamin’s fans trekking out to the property, which they say is zoned for agricultural or forest uses.

In an email to county officials, one neighbor pointed out that the property isn’t serviced by utilities, raising the threat that inexperienced campers could start forest fires in their attempts to have campfires. The property is connected to a narrow, crude road, according to the neighbors, whose meager maintenance amounts to residents adding rocks to it every year.

Benjamin’s neighbors have also become alarmed over the possibility of organized military training at the property.

“This poses a clear and present danger,” a Vietnam War veteran who lives near Benjamin told the Kootenai Valley Times. “This is a commercial enterprise offering training in weapons and tactics and not a use allowed in this zone. There is no conceivable reason to allow this use. If we wait too long, it will be too late.”

Benjamin told The Daily Beast no guns have been fired on the property since he purchased it. But his attempts to downplay the possibility of guns at Ursa Rio have been undermined by his habit of describing grandiose plans for the land in hours-long livestreams several times a week, with the most incendiary statements archived and analyzed by his online detractors.

For example, Benjamin has often referenced having a paramilitary force at his property, saying he is “friends with, basically, a paramilitary group” in Idaho.

“If you try to squat on my land when I offer you campgrounds, I have my own paramilitary squad,” Benjamin said in one video, warning off “Bears” who might try to live on the land permanently.

“I’d have my own private paramilitary force, which is always a good thing,” Benjamin said in another video.

Benjamin insists he was just joking about the paramilitary.

“I do not have a paramilitary squad,” Benjamin told The Daily Beast in an email. “I was making a joke as a comedian. Unless you consider my goats and chickens a military.”

In his videos, Benjamin has also discussed the prospect of guns at “Beartaria.”

“Shooting range?” Benjamin said in one video, describing his plans for a bear-themed community in Idaho. “Yes! Will there be a gun range? Yes!”

By his own accounts, Benjamin does not come off as an ideal neighbor. In several videos, he relates stories where he berates store employees or fellow customers who asked him to wear a face mask. In one incident, according to Benjamin, he called an elderly man in a post office who asked him to wear a mask a “crusty old hunchback” and accused him of being a pervert, saying that masks are only used by criminals or perverts.

After a reporter in the area covered the controversy over Benjamin’s property, the comedian baselessly accused the reporter during a livestream of being a pedophile and mocked him for using a wheelchair.

The entire article is nothing but a series of baseless accusations. Notice that not a single one of these “concerned neighbors” is named. But it’s a good idea to keep this article in mind if you think you’re ever going to escape the conflict simply by moving and minding your own business. Once the media decides you are dangerous to it – and the defeat of Patreon in court by Owen’s Bears combined with the retreat from arbitration on the part of every Big Tech company from Amazon on down is probably what alarmed the media – they will always look to find a way to sic some sort of authority on you.

And unfortunately, unlike in Europe where defamation laws are still enforced to the point that a well-known television celebrity is now facing bankruptcy for a single tweet falsely accusing a woman of having had an affair, the US media can still expect to get away with nonsense like this. So remember, everything you say and write will be used against you in the court of public opinion.

Knowing Owen, he’ll befriend those frightened neighbors before the end of the summer, at which point the Daily Beast will be forced to invent some other fake controversy. But Owen really needs to up his media game. He really should have known the correct way to address the reporter’s alleged idiosyncracies was to say that “a group of the reporter’s neighbors have grown concerned about the prospect of the reporter being a pedophile and fear that he might run over their children’s toes with his wheelchair.”

I’d heard some of the rumors talking about an August timeframe for a Trump return to the White House, so it’s interesting to see that they have now entered the mainstream narrative:

But hey, if you’re going to sell out, at least make sure you get something valuable for your soul:

For the past six years of OutKick radio, Julie Talbott, Don Martin and Scott Shapiro, the best bosses I’ve ever had, have supported me 100{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6}. Not once have I ever gotten a call asking me to avoid a topic or to be careful about what I was saying on a sensitive issue. All three of them have been absolutely fantastic. My wife, whose counsel I trust more than anyone on the planet, said upon meeting Julie and Don for the first time six years ago, “These people barely know you and they already treat you better than anyone you’ve ever worked for.” She, as usual, was right.

Several months ago, Julie Talbott called me with a question: What did I think about the idea of moving to the Rush Limbaugh time slot? Note, she didn’t say, “What do you think about replacing Rush Limbaugh?”

So beginning in June, instead of hearing me daily on Fox Sports Radio nationwide, you will be hearing me from 12-3 Eastern every day, on the largest radio show network in the country. And I’ll be joined by co-host Buck Sexton, whom I believe many of you will come to love as well. This is a secret both of us have been keeping quiet for months now. We’ve even done secret mock shows with each other in addition to the daily shows we’ve been doing. Trust me on this, Buck is fantastic, and we are going to have the best daily conversations anywhere on radio. I’m 100{cc08d85cfa54367952ab9c6bd910a003a6c2c0c101231e44cdffb103f39b73a6} confident of this fact.

His cluelessness is actually kind of cute. 

These wonderful people treat me so well and say such nice things to me! They gave me lots of money, they never tell me what do to or say, and now they’re giving me the biggest microphone in the country!

Congratulations, Clay. Now try saying “Free Palestine” or talking about Ann Frank’s ballpoint pen on that big microphone and you’ll see their other face.

If you want to know where the next batch of cuckservative talking heads can be found, they’re pupating in the swamp of the controlled fake opposition at Newsmax:

As the two fringe cable TV outlets battle for former President Donald Trump’s affections, several high-profile One America News staffers have jumped ship to Newsmax—not just in pursuit of a larger audience, insiders said, but also as a respite from OAN’s increasing extremism.

Already known for its cartoonishly bonkers MAGA propagandizing, OAN in recent months has veered even further into unhinged right-wing territory. And Newsmax—which is often just as obsequiously pro-Trump in its commentary—has pulled back on its wildest election conspiracy theories while hoovering up some of OAN’s top on-air talent: news anchor Alex Salvi, correspondent Jenn Pellegrino, and reporter Amanda Brilhante. Those moves followed Newsmax poaching OAN’s White House correspondent Emerald Robinson last year.

Pellegrino, who served as a White House correspondent and on-air host for OAN, abruptly left the far-right channel earlier this month, only for Newsmax to announce her debut as co-anchor of a 9 p.m. ET program called Cortes and Pellegrino, co-hosted by former Trump campaign senior adviser Steve Cortes.

In late March, meanwhile, Salvi—one of OAN’s rare “straight news” anchors—revealed during his media-focused show After Hours that he was exiting the network after hosting since 2019. A few weeks later, Salvi quietly showed up on Newsmax, revealing his new role as a Rome-based foreign correspondent with the network. Brilhante, who’d been with OAN since graduating college in 2017, was hired away in February to be Newsmax’s breaking news reporter.

Newsmax is literally the most bogus operation with which I have ever have had the misfortune of working. I have more respect and affection for both GT Interactive and Indiegogo, and we all know how those relationships turned out. Some longtime readers may recall the brief period when VP featured ads, which were small and wouldn’t have been distracting if they hadn’t so often mentioned CELEBRITY FEET! or other ridiculous topics that still puzzle me as to how they qualify as a variety of clickbait.

Anyhow, I was paid for the ads, and the contract specified a significant boost once the blog got to a certain level of traffic, which might have been one million monthly pageviews. Like I said, this was a while ago, probably 2014. Once I’d hit that target which they’d specified, I let them know, along with a screenshot proving that the target had been legitimately hit. Newsmax’s response? They immediately terminated the target and never paid the previous two months that they’d owed.

About 18 months later, they came back and tried to pitch me on working with them again. Let’s just say that I actually laughed before declining in no uncertain terms.

So, I’ve known they were shady for some time now. But as AC points out, in light of the CEO’s million-dollar donation to the Clinton Foundation and the way they are now throwing out tickets to those willing to take them, it’s pretty clear that they go well beyond shady.

Fred Rogers’s children’s ministry wasn’t exactly what one would call conventional, and he certainly didn’t win his war against the wicked medium of television. But he fought a much better fight, and fought it for far longer, than most Christians in these latter days of the latest iteration of The Empire That Never Ended. This is the 1998 article upon which the movie I mentioned on a recent Darkstream was based; it’s intriguing to see both how much the movie relied upon it and where the movie departed from it in the interests of drama:

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a man took off his jacket and put on a sweater. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of sneakers. His name was Fred Rogers. He was starting a television program, aimed at children, called Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. He had been on television before, but only as the voices and movements of puppets, on a program called The Children’s Corner. Now he was stepping in front of the camera as Mister Rogers, and he wanted to do things right, and whatever he did right, he wanted to repeat. And so, once upon a time, Fred Rogers took off his jacket and put on a sweater his mother had made him, a cardigan with a zipper. Then he took off his shoes and put on a pair of navy-blue canvas boating sneakers. He did the same thing the next day, and then the next…until he had done the same things, those things, 865 times, at the beginning of 865 television programs, over a span of thirty-one years. The first time I met Mister Rogers, he told me a story of how deeply his simple gestures had been felt, and received. He had just come back from visiting Koko, the gorilla who has learned—or who has been taught—American Sign Language. Koko watches television. Koko watches Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and when Mister Rogers, in his sweater and sneakers, entered the place where she lives, Koko immediately folded him in her long, black arms, as though he were a child, and then … “She took my shoes off, Tom,” Mister Rogers said….

The first time I called Mister Rogers on the telephone, I woke him up from his nap. He takes a nap every day in the late afternoon—just as he wakes up every morning at five-thirty to read and study and write and pray for the legions who have requested his prayers; just as he goes to bed at nine-thirty at night and sleeps eight hours without interruption. On this afternoon, the end of a hot, yellow day in New York City, he was very tired, and when I asked if I could go to his apartment and see him, he paused for a moment and said shyly, “Well, Tom, I’m in my bathrobe, if you don’t mind.” I told him I didn’t mind, and when, five minutes later, I took the elevator to his floor, well, sure enough, there was Mister Rogers, silver-haired, standing in the golden door at the end of the hallway and wearing eyeglasses and suede moccasins with rawhide laces and a flimsy old blue-and-yellow bathrobe that revealed whatever part of his skinny white calves his dark-blue dress socks didn’t hide. “Welcome, Tom,” he said with a slight bow, and bade me follow him inside, where he lay down—no, stretched out, as though he had known me all his life—on a couch upholstered with gold velveteen. He rested his head on a small pillow and kept his eyes closed while he explained that he had bought the apartment thirty years before for $11,000 and kept it for whenever he came to New York on business for the Neighborhood. 

I sat in an old armchair and looked around. The place was drab and dim, with the smell of stalled air and a stain of daguerreotype sunlight on its closed, slatted blinds, and Mister Rogers looked so at home in its gloomy familiarity that I thought he was going to fall back asleep when suddenly the phone rang, startling him. “Oh, hello, my dear,” he said when he picked it up, and then he said that he had a visitor, someone who wanted to learn more about the Neighborhood. “Would you like to speak to him?” he asked, and then handed me the phone. “It’s Joanne,” he said. I took the phone and spoke to a woman—his wife, the mother of his two sons—whose voice was hearty and almost whooping in its forthrightness and who spoke to me as though she had known me for a long time and was making the effort to keep up the acquaintance. When I handed him back the phone, he said, “Bye, my dear,” and hung up and curled on the couch like a cat, with his bare calves swirled underneath him and one of his hands gripping his ankle, so that he looked as languorous as an odalisque. There was an energy to him, however, a fearlessness, an unashamed insistence on intimacy, and though I tried to ask him questions about himself, he always turned the questions back on me, and when I finally got him to talk about the puppets that were the comfort of his lonely boyhood, he looked at me, his gray-blue eyes at once mild and steady, and asked,

“What about you, Tom? Did you have any special friends growing up?”

“Special friends?”

“Yes,” he said. “Maybe a puppet, or a special toy, or maybe just a stuffed animal you loved very much. Did you have a special friend like that, Tom?”

“Yes, Mister Rogers.”

“Did your special friend have a name, Tom?”

“Yes, Mister Rogers. His name was Old Rabbit.”

“Old Rabbit. Oh, and I’ll bet the two of you were together since he was a very young rabbit. Would you like to tell me about Old Rabbit, Tom?”

It’s not unusual that a child with a difficult experience growing up will transform that experience into strength, or even into something resembling a psychological superpower. But it’s very rare to see that sort of strength utilized in such a kind, positive, and focused manner. 

Clay Travis celebrates being bought by the Murdoch Cube:

So how do you get kids, who have tremendous advantages you didn’t have, to work hard and compete in the future? That’s what I’m going to spend the next 10-15 years working on with my boys. And it’s a new concern that I’m grappling with right now.

But after we signed the papers to sell OutKick, I turned to my wife and told her there would never be any kids, grandkids or great-grandkids who had to worry about money during our lifetimes. (They all may blow it after we die.) And that was a pretty incredible moment to have as parents, and hopefully future grandparents and great-grandparents too.

I also told my wife that since she’s going to live to be over 100 years old and I think I’m probably going to die around 51 years old from working too much that she’s going to be a really rich widow for a long time.

On the one hand, you can’t fault an entrepreneur for living the dream. Selling out is the original objective for most startups. On the other hand, if you’re preaching about the importance of independent media, being your own boss, and the evils of the corrupt mainstream media, then how on Earth can you justify selling out to the very people responsible for the problem in the first place? It’s not merely hypocritical, it’s outright wrong.

Anyhow, I thought this graphic below was an interesting comparison. Note that SimilarWeb seriously underestimates VP’s pageviews – which according to Google were over 8 million in January – but I assume it does the same for everyone, so it’s the relative aspect that matters. Fortunately, no media company is interesting in acquiring VP and I have absolutely no interest in taking any tickets. Among other things, I know how fast what appears to be “generational money” can vanish, even during the founder’s lifetime. You may be able to outkick the coverage, but once you take it, you can’t outkick the ticket.

Gandhi’s Law: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

Drudge’s Addendum: After which they buy you out and undo everything you accomplished.

The Drudge Report’s drift from its original Internet rebelliousness took another step into mainstream irrelevance with a purge this week of links to pioneering conservative sites The Gateway Pundit, World Net Daily, Free Republic, Daily Wire and Western Journal, and Lucianne.com. Also reportedly gone are links to the late Rush Limbaugh’s site and columnist David Limbaugh.

Infowars and ZeroHedge survived the purge, however one report observed ZeroHedge was delisted for a time this week.

The Drudge Report has gone through a sharp change in recent years leading to speculation about whether reclusive owner-editor Matt Drudge secretly sold the site and relinquished control. Regardless, the site is not what it used to be and has lost substantial traffic.

Last month the Press Gazette reported the Drudge Report lost over forty percent of its traffic year-on-year from February 2020 to February 2021, “Influential conservative news aggregation site the Drudge Report saw its year-on-year visits fall by 41{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} from 71.4 million to 42.4 million.”

This is why the entrepreneur’s dream of being acquired or going public is so ultimately futile. Because unless you’re creating something purely for the love of filthy lucre, selling out is going to destroy what you created. The more effective and beautiful your creation, the more demand there will be to subvert it, if not entirely invert it.

Joseph Farah of WND saw it coming.

In the early days, WND had the distinguished honor of having more links back on Drudge than any other website. Joseph Farah was the second one. How did I achieve it way back in the ’90s? I simply asked for it. Yes, Drudge and I had a real relationship. That’s how I knew in recent years that it wasn’t Drudge in charge. He sold it – or sold out. 

Fortunately, there is still Infogalactic News for all your daily aggregated news links. 

Not bad, considering that unlike its traffic peers, this is just a blog that doesn’t even purport to be any sort of magazine or corporate endeavor. I’m a little surprised there are more visits here than to The Unz Review, given the higher pageviews there, but Ron features deeper and more varied content, so I suppose that makes sense. Anyhow, Ron is right to observe that while the converged social media companies can take a bite out of our traffic, they can’t stop the greater part of the signal.

Remember, the only thing you can be certain is false is what the mainstream media says is true. AC points out that the curious thing about DMX’s death isn’t that there were what appear to have been false claims made about him overdosing, but rather, the way the false narrative was instantly pushed worldwide.

Family member confirms rapper DMX was given the Covid vaccine days before his lethal heart attack, and say the heart attack that led to his death was not from a drug overdose. Even more amazing to me than the fact they killed him with their Umbrella Corporation vaccine, is the fact the Cabal propaganda machine, that is mainstream media reporters, immediately knew he had died from the vaccine, and knew they had to cover it up, and manufactured the drug overdose cover story (sullying his name in death, in the process, to save their mass experiment on the human race). Otherwise, if the story just came in he died from a heart attack, a clueless reporter would report he died from a heart attack alone, and then they’d have waited for more information. Ask yourself, how did the media know immediately that he was vaccinated, the heart attack was due to it, and they needed a made up cover story? 

It’s getting harder and harder for the media to deny the adverse effects of the not-vaccine, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try.

Spotify is slowly chipping away at Joe Rogan’s podcast library:

Months after random, woke, and easily replaceable Spotify employees threatened to strike until Joe Rogan is censored, the podcast service quietly removed 42 — 42! — “controversial” episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience.

According to Digital Music News, which first noticed the removals, Spotify took down a recent episode with Dave Asprey, the founder of Bulletproof Coffee, who claims he will live to 180. I’m not sure if Asprey will make it to 180, but fans of JRE won’t get to hear his case anymore.

Other recently canceled episodes include interviews with Brian Redban, seven episodes with David Seaman, four episodes with comedian Chris D’Elia, Gavin McInnes, Milo Yiannopoulous, and Eddie Bravo.

Taking the ticket will reliably result in regret of one sort or another.